Frequently-Asked Questions

General

• What is an Open Archive ?
• Who can submit ?
• What can I submit via TeLearn ?
• Why should I submit via TeLearn ?

Copyrights

• What about IPR and plagiarism ?
• What is the right to self-archive ?
• What are the copyrights of employees ?
• What are my responsibilities as depositor ?
• Can a co-author refuse to submit his or her document via TeLearn ?
• What are my obligations as depositor ?
• What should I consider when depositing my work in TeLearn ?
• How should I negotiate my agreements with publishers ?
• What can do readers ?

Technical

• How I can write the keywords ?
• What are the differences between standard and free keyword ?
• How I can use RSS feed with TeLearn?
• What is a stamp and who can use it?

Open Archiving is a means by which researchers (or indeed other authors of published materials) are able to submit their publications to an online archive, access to which can usually be made free of charge. The Internet, and electronic publishing, have made it easier to disseminate published material, and Open Archives ensure that researchers can reach other researchers work - the primary target audience - without having to rely on the publishers to do the disseminating for them. Open Archiving also cuts out the need for researchers to provide publishers with copy ready for publishing, the irony being that very often that has to be bought back by educational institutions and organizations representing the researchers, often at significant cost, once published.

Kaleidoscope is a member of the Open Archive Initiative . This is an international movement that aims at ensuring that researchers will be able to share the outcomes of their work openly, freely and reliably. The Kaleidoscope Open Archive, TeLearn, will collect and archive scientific and other publications from across the TEL domain. The TeLearn repository enables researchers to search, browse and submit and view research publications from across the European TEL domain and from beyond. It is proposed that TeLearn will become THE Open Archive for the Technology Enhanced Learning community in Europe.

For more informations, go to http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/

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Everyone can submit, once identified. Identification requires the membership of an institution duly affiliated to TeLearn. If you don't find your institution in the list when you register, then you will have to ask some leader from your institution to affiliate it with Telearn first.

Open archives are based on the principle of self-archiving. There are two ways to submit:

• If, according to the practices of the organization you work for, you are the author of publications , then it is up to you, the researcher, to submit your own publications, after having requested permission from your co-authors, if any. If you want to submit a publication (pre-print document), you may need to ask the advice of your Project Manager. That is because the publication represents a commitment by your organization
• If the copyrights on your publications belong to the organization you work for, then you submit them in its name, according to the internal procedures in place.

You can submit a variety of publications relating to the domain of Technology Enhanced Learning: articles ( pre-publication or post-publication, provided that you check the publisher's rights), presentations, courses, Grey literature, (non-confidential) research reports.

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Visibility and impact:
Articles published online are immediately and freely available. By publishing in TeLearn, you significantly increase the number of times your work is cited by your peers. It has been proven that online articles may be cited up to five times more frequently than the others. Their domestic and international impact is optimized (see Online or Invisible?, by Steve Lawrence, NEC Research institute).

Longevity
Many researchers already put their articles on their home pages, or on the home page of their project or their institution.
What extra benefits does TeLearn provide? For researchers, it is the assurance that all their publications will be indexed and saved (with their various source file formats: LaTeX, ps, TeX and associated pdf) in a single location that will be available for an extended period.

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Concerning intellectual property and plagiarism, the fear is high, but may be essentially because of the ignorance of the (institutional) way the archiving is organized and of what the technology can bring. It might seem amazing, but the Open Archive will actually provide researchers with more protection. First the material uploaded is clearly identified with all the basic data including the date of the publication.

This is an efficient way to fix the ownership, date, and content of a publication. Moreover, the means and the computational power now exist, to verify the similarities of the content of papers in a way much more efficient than ever possible until now. Computational techniques like latent semantic analysis (LSA) allow the clustering documents based on the analysis of their content and the investigation of the proximity of their content.

The right to self-archive the refereed postprint is a legal matter because the copyright transfer agreement pertains to that text. But the pre-refereed preprint is self-archived at a time when no copyright transfer agreement exists and so the author holds exclusive and full copyright. In general, when you publish in a journal you transfer copyright to the publisher. Most journals permit self-archiving, but it depends on the publisher's copyright policy. Authors can also deposit the postprint inside the archive with restricted access. Authors may request that the publisher give back certain rights, e.g. the right to deposit the postprint in an open access archive, or to put it on your own homepage. Some publishers have stated that they grant these rights as a standard procedure. Copyright law gives the creator of copyrighted work exclusive rights, which may be both segmented and transferred to others. Source : http://eprints.rclis.org/copyright.html

According to their national law, authors may or may not retain the moral rights to their publications, whether or not they are employees.
This principle may be subject to changes via agreements, so we suggest you check that your copyrights have not been transferred to your original organization.

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The researcher is responsible to check that his or her co-authors agree to submit the publication via TeLearn, that it does not infringe on the rights of the publisher with whom the researcher has entered an agreement, and that it does not infringe on the interest of KALEIDOSCOPE or the organization that the researcher works for.

A co-author may refuse to submit a document to TeLearn, even if submitting does go against that person's best interest. You may want to discuss this point with your co-authors even before you write the article together. Note however that publication rules vary according to the organization. If one of your co-authors comes from another organization, you must apply that organization's rules.

The submitter is obliged to respect the agreement he or she has signed with the publisher. But the agreement may be less restrictive than you think. To determine whether your publisher allows you to submit your publication, visit the following site Sherpa/Romeo, which provides information on the rights claimed by various publishers concerning self-archiving.

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The only risk is of publishing a document that your publisher does not authorize you to distribute on an open archive server. Remember to check in your publishing agreement or at the following site Sherpa/Romeo, that your publisher authorizes you to publish online.

Carefully read the publisher's agreement before signing it. It is often possible to cross out or limit restrictive clauses.

The documents posted on TeLearn archive are protected by copyright, retained by the authors, or by other ownerships. Authors or Publishers control translation and reproduction rights to these works. However, users of the works are granted permission for individual, educational research, and non-commercial reproduction under national, foreign, and international laws on Copyright.
The works included in TeLearn are the property of their authors and are used by permission. Since the rules for use of published electronic documents are still somewhat undefined, we insist that users apply the same principles of fair use to the works in this electronic archive that they would to a published, printed archive. These works may be read online, downloaded for personal use, or the URL of a document (from this server) can be included in another electronic document. The text itself may not be published commercially (in print or electronic form), edited, or otherwise altered without the permission of the author. As with printed materials, care should be taken when excerpting or referencing text to ensure that the views, opinions, and arguments of the author accurately reflect those contained in the original work.

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Guidelines* to write the keywords are as follows:

1. Language
   Keywords must be in English.
   
2. Typography
   Words must be written in lowercase, except for proper nouns (such as the name of software, or a country), which are capitalized. Acronyms and abbreviations must be written in uppercase and without punctuation separating (example : UK).
   
3. Plurals/Singular
   Where appropriate, most nouns can be expressed as plural (example: mobile devices). However, there are some exceptions, which should be expressed in the singular (example: knowledge). Abstract concepts (systems of belief, activities, disciplines) should also be expressed in the singular (example: educational psychology).
   
4. Acronym, abbreviation initial
   Acronyms and abbreviation initials can be written in this way: meaning (Acronym/abbreviation)
   example: computer assisted language learning (CALL)
   
*Guidelines 2 and 3 are recommended by the standard of ANSI/NISO Z39.19-2005.

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Standard keywords appear in black.They were created by Kaleidoscope members at the beginning of the project. This standard list is a general concept list of TEL field.
Free keywords appear in grey.They are ones suggested by users. They may integrate the standard list when proved widely used.
In submission process, at less one standard keyword is mandatory. As a general principle, I advise you choose a keyword defining a general concept/idea that words are not in title or abstract.

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RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.
Users of RSS content use programs called feed "readers" or "aggregators": the user subscribes to a feed by supplying to his or her reader a link to the feed; the reader can then check the user's subscribed feeds to see if any of those feeds have new content since the last time it checked, and if so, retrieve that content and present it to the user.
Aggregator features are being built into portal sites such as My Yahoo! and Google; modern web browsers; and e-mail programs.
(source : « RSS ». In Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [Online]. (17/04/2007))

TeLearn website provides currently three feeds :

1. http://www.telearn.org/resource.rss?lastpublications
   to be informed on the last published publications
2. http://www.telearn.org/resource.rss?lastvideos
   to be informed on the last published videos
3. http://www.telearn.org/resource.rss?lastpublicationsbystamp_[Stamp Name]
   to be informed on the last publications stamped with a given stamp [Stamp Name]. This feed is provided into the browse by collection of TeLearn. Be careful to respect case and white space(s) if any.
   e.g. For the Kaleidoscope stamp named "Kaleidoscope Research Report", the web link is : http://www.telearn.org/resource.rss?lastpublicationsbystamp_Kaleidoscope Research Report

The list of RSS is here.

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Stamp is a mark to present a collection of an institution or a papers of a conference/proceeding. To search a stamp, you go to the left menu Browse/Publications/by collection. "Stamper" is designed by manager of TeLearn affiliate institution.

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Update: october 4, 2007